Bright Angel Feet

Jesse B. Pounds, Stopford A. Brooke, Sabine Baring-Gould, Alfred H. Ackley-there's poetry in the very names of the writers of Standard Hymns. There's poetry too when Gary Lechliter uses the titles of the hymns as the starting points of his darkly witty poems here-"The Morning Walks Upon the Earth," "Haste, Traveler, Haste ", "Ave Maria," etc. Lechliter brings us into his own world of walks round his Kansas neighborhood in falling snow, a rusted 53 Studebaker, old couples out for a walk on glazed streets, a recluse behind tinted windows who lost half his face in the war. With the "lack of angels" nowadays, good folk gather to "warm our souls by the fire/and burst into poetry." Here the Rock of Ages turns into the "Rocks of Age" burdening the old until they talk in double negatives like "you got no friends no/more that aren't dead." It's also turned into the "lovely darkness" of rock music, from Elvis to Jimi Hendrix to Pink Floyd. As far as religion is concerned, Lechliter warns us to watch out: let in a couple of callers from the Pie-in-the-Sky Church and next morning there's a Southern Baptist Convention in your house, "milling around with their shoes off, /draining the Pinot Noir"-just too much of that old-time religion. According to this humble preacher, when we all get to heaven there are no streets of gold but, running towards us, all our favorite dogs keen to lick our faces. How can you not love a heaven like that?-Brian Daldorph, Editor, Coal City Review